AN INVITATION
Hello, dear valued students at Ashoka University!
We extend our warm regards and invite you to a celebration of the Ashokan administration at Reddy’s Auditorium. After all, we can only pat ourselves on the back so much before we get an arm cramp. It also gets exhausting to take random photographs of people hanging out in the mess lawns and uploading them on social media to celebrate Ashoka’s vibrant campus culture. For some reason, more and more people are refusing to appear in our candid videos too – it can’t be like the students have run out of nice things to say about us, right?
So, we’re inviting you to Reddy’s Auditorium: the most democratic space in our University, where everyone gets equal access to our terrible sound system. While we appreciate spontaneity in our students, we’ve come to the collective decision that for this event, the audience must come prepared. If that disastrous Edict interview has taught us anything, it’s this – sometimes, you just have to fix the talking points before getting on stage. Otherwise, there’s no guaranteeing what obscure and irrelevant attacks the student body might come armed with to the event.
Don’t get us wrong. We respect you as individuals enormously, but it couldn’t hurt for you to focus on all the good things we’ve done for you so far, for once!
We’re fixing your back problems
That’s right: we’ve taken away the pillows from you because we want to ensure your spines are aligned and well-rested, before you march off to slouch in front of your laptop at your 8:30 class anyway. The pillows themselves are all alive and jolly – they’ve been moved to a farm upstate, somewhere in Haryana, living a happening life and running around with their fellow pillow mates. But I’m afraid you won’t be seeing them again. It’s for your own good that we’ve done this, trust us.
“And while we recognize the challenge in carrying a pillow along with you during your commute, you can always order one to campus from an e-commerce platform to avoid transportation related hassles that have been mentioned. Alternatively, you could purchase a pillow from Sonipat or Delhi after your arrival on campus through local vendors.” Easy peasy, folks!
We’re also not giving you typhoid
Alright, now that’s just a win-win. After a thorough examination of the water quality in the coolers, we’ve decided to remove them. The reports came back, and were they questionable. Turns out that not cleaning the coolers often enough leads them to be contaminated. So, we’ve decided to go with the age-old strategy any rational person in a position of authority would follow: the moment we identify there is a problem, we solve it by getting rid of whatever was causing it in the first place.
A Professor stirring up too much of a PR storm with his op-eds? Gently nudge him onto better opportunities abroad. Authorities facing criticism from a student-led newspaper? Remind them of their ‘independent’ status by cutting off their funding. And realising that the water quality in the coolers might be borderline suable if someone bothers to test it out themselves? Get rid of the coolers.
Well, we’re lucky that we’re so good at our jobs – otherwise, we’d have to get rid of ourselves from this University too.
Giving you a taste of the real world
The mess food we serve is just the best. How do we know that? We’ve taken peeks at the Post-Its stuck to the walls, appreciating the variety in our dals and the freshness of our rotis. You know what they say: feedback gathered while cornering students during their meals, and hovering above them while they write it out, always brings the most honest responses out of them.
But we still go out of our way to make eating a pleasant experience for all of you. The Grub Fest was such a hit, right? Don’t think too much about how we made our employees wear V for Vendetta masks for long periods of time. It might feel quite dystopic the moment you begin to think about the way the blue-collared employees are treated here – but hey, they’re not under our direct employment, so that absolves us of any blame. Anyway, why think about life too much when you can dance to Udd Gaye?
We also hope you haven’t thought too much about how we’ve removed the prices of the coupons from the displays of the coupon machines. That way, when we send our invoices to collect the fees for your gluttony at the end of the semester, you’ll have plenty of food for thought to wonder where you spent so much money.
This is just us doing our best to acclimatise you to the way the world works. Keep getting food poisoning from the mess? Well, we’re teaching you to deal with the displacement of responsibility – psst, it’s the dudes down at Cafe Aroma who have E. Coli in their chicken, so they’re the cause for your sickness. Oh, what, you’ve never been there? Well, then you’re getting sick because of how often you’re taking the plates out of the mess. There’s nothing we can do about it.
Except, of course, point towards all the amazing food outlets we have on campus. What, now you’re complaining about how we subsidise none of them and this oligopoly of outlets ensures all of them can overcharge you for the most basic food? This is why we wanted you to keep your incessant questioning to yourself.
It’s always questions, questions, questions with you. Why can’t we just have a pleasant dialogue where it’s us talking the entire time, celebrating all that we do for you? Cut us some slack, alright – we’re building a new campus. You might be paying us an exorbitant amount of money to get your education, but we have more important things to invest the funds in than fulfilling your basic necessities and demands.
Dissent, much like a juvenile burst of graffiti, doesn’t paint a good look on campus. So, dear students, we hope you turn up in great numbers at Reddy’s Auditorium this Sund … Oh, wait a second. Our sincere apologies. We’ve shut that down for the rest of the semester for energy conservation reasons.
You might say that there’s a lot else we could do to be energy efficient instead of shutting down the biggest venue that hosts most of the major events organised by the student body. We’re even hosting our own events there, including that fest about library technology or something. But anything the students might want to access the space for is simply impossible – because energy conservation. Trust us, don’t think too much about it.
Even if you spoke up, we wouldn’t be listening, because we only take a break from patting our backs to hold our hands over our ears and shut out any criticism. We’ve made a decision without looping any of you in for feedback. Now, let’s see if enough of you guys manage to come together and fight to get it back – our eyes will be on you.
And if you don’t, like we expect, that’ll mean we’ve done our jobs exceedingly well.
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